How Society, Science and Technology interact with each other

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I just finished watching Black Mirror’s episode called Nosedive, which is an interesting episode about the impact of continually rating people for every social interaction. It explores what happens when someone who was previously a very high rated person has a very bad day. It was, implied that it would happen throughout episode, that everyone was just a series of misfortunate events away from dropping from their current social hierarchy to a lower strata where they’d be unable to function in current society. Ratings indicate which jobs a person can have or not. Dropping too low indicates you’re not worthy of that job and in many cases, network effects and game theory type logic comes into play. Where you have to judge if a low ranking person or a person that’s currently out of favor would negatively impact your image.If that would drop you from a person of respect to a person of disrepute.

This episode made me uncomfortable to watch, because in a lot of ways it feels like it hits close to home as it deals with a major reason why I don’t like social media. I don’t like the constant need for validation through pictures, likes, and comments. I’ve tried to, in general avoid, Facebook lately, because it feels inauthentic, and creepy. Between Facebook, itself, tracking what you do online and partners with companies to track your shopping habits offline. Combing that with the desire to display the best of your life on platforms like Instagram, this can lead to depression.

In many articles it’s because of the fact that you’re comparing your messy every day life to what people are willing to post, which typically represents the best parts of their life. Their happy dogs, walking in a vineyard, going surfing, or some new thing that they bought. Even if you know that you are doing this, doesn’t really help. However, I think there’s a few reasons beyond that. For one, it forces you to live an inauthentic life, which is one of the major themes in the show Nosedive. The character knows she’s putting on a show and clearly has some serious anxiety around behaving that way. Her brother, who lives a more authentic life, doesn’t care as much about his social media score and directly asks for Lacie (the main character) to return to her authentic self (“remember when we had real conversations?”)

Being an inauthentic version of yourself is a type of acting as well pushing down the values you actually believe in. This is something referenced in Lost Connections as a root cause of depression. Where our intrinsic values do not align with society’s values and we must adopt society’s values over our own we become depressed. In the episode it Lacie only became aware that it was a possible to reject those norms when she was picked up by a trucker with a rate of 1.4/5. This woman allowed her to reflect on her experience as her rating declined and bottomed out.

However, it wasn’t until she’d been rejected by the society and put into a prison of sorts that she was able to find a truly authentic interaction. It was rage filled, but eventually became filled with joy as the two people in prison were able to be an authentic version of themselves.

In our society, while we don’t have the intensity portrayed in the episode with social media, it is possible we could move into that direction over time. For us to really have authentic interactions, we need to find people that support us being our authentic selves even when there are people in our lives that might not fully support our decisions. Or people in our lives that make it more difficult to be authentic.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. Not about my normal stuff, I think I’m feeling a bit down from not having much of a social life out here – had a friend in town likely sparked that a bit. Life’s complicated. We don’t live in a nice neat linear world where the good guy wins because the author wants it to be that way (or talks about how they should have written the series differently after making billions).

The world we live in is complex. Seemingly random decisions can impact the rest of your life. A flip of a coin over which grad program to go to, a roll of the die to pick between 4 jobs after college, living with all new people my freshman year at Pitt, even the decision to go to Pitt over anywhere else were all fairly haphazard and without much of a plan. I went with a lot of gut feelings with those choices. They’ve all lead me on pretty crazy and interesting adventures. If I hadn’t lived on the 9th floor in Tower A I would never have ended up living with 5 girls my Junior Year and none of the adventures all of my friends had there would have happened.

We don’t like complexity. We like to think that the path that we’re on was the one we were always destined to be on. It’s very nice and easy to look at the complex history of technology, science, and society to think that our current culture was pre-ordained in some manner. So many different choices could have dramatically altered where we are now. Just one of those decisions I mentioned above would likely have altered my life and everyone I’ve met since dramatically. This thought really struck me while I was watching an Episode of Cosmos. Essentially the entire German lens industry hinged on a SINGLE arbitrary moment of kindness from a Prince and soon to be King.

We punish people that remind us of complexity. Think of all the times people talk about “Flip-Flopping” in politics. You get punished for changing your mind because you’ve learned more. When I’m at my most arrogant I like to think that I’ve been really consistent with my thinking since as far as I can remember, but I know that’s not true. I’ve learned a lot and met a ton of new people, there’s no way I could NOT have been influenced and changed what I believed about a topic.

All these thoughts have been rattling around my head because they are essentially making me ask, yet again, what do I want out of life. I have a good job, I’m buying a house, I have a great wife, but what do I want?

I’m working on learning programming so I can start a company, it’s slow going, but it’s going at least. I want to write a book, but that’s even slower going – I’m finding with my current schedule I don’t have time to do both, let alone have a life outside of spending time with my wife’s friends. That being said, I think I need to do some soul searching on where I want my career as well as my social life.

On the Max ride home today, I heard to late 40-50ish guys having a chat about the down fall of the current generation of kids. I was trying to read my book, but the conversation ranged from the casually uninformed, family first thoughts, to the down right ignorant. According to these gentlemen our society is in the shitter because of the decline of the nuclear family, kids think video games are real, and therefore the kids in Columbine thought that they could take 8 bullets and come back to life. I had to restrain myself from commenting on this bucket of ignorance.

First of all, the nuclear family is essentially a myth. we’ve had modified family structures for as long as there have been families. A ton of people I know have had parents that have divorced, one spouse cheating on the other, or some sort of death in the family. Almost all of these people have turned out reasonably well. Everyone has their problems, but I don’t think that it’s solely due to family structure problems. If anything, the family structure problems that these guys are talking about are related to problems more closely associated with inequality and the fact that these families have someone in prison, work 2 or 3 jobs to support their family. These folks have to work so much because they can’t afford rent and our economy is structured around the car, which most of these people are being priced out of.

Second of all, violence and confusion over video games and reality don’t really exist. According to a recent study, if people are aggressive during or after a game it’s NOT because of the violence or lack thereof, but because of a lack of skill or fairness in the game. Apparently, people are more aggressive if Tetris is more difficult than if it’s easier. I think that Candy Crush Saga is a perfect example of this. The most difficult levels are frustrating because it has nothing to do with your skill, solely if you get the right combination of candies to effect a board clearing combination. Even if you do everything perfectly, you can still lose – which keeps pulling you back in. Dark Souls is another case in point. The game is so frustratingly difficult that many people rage quit, but they keep coming back because of the sense of accomplishment upon completing these difficult monsters/bosses. Essentially, the reward of accomplishment and skill accrual is worth the frustration.

Finally, because of this clear separation between reality and game the boys in Columbine didn’t think they could take a ton of bullets. This is obvious due to the fact that they committed suicide with one bullet. The problem with those boys is the fact that we don’t really speak to each other well about our problems. Marilyn Manson had the best response to that back shortly after the horrific events happened.

The conversation between these two men really just struck me as two guys looking for someone to listen to them and parrot it back. Honestly thought, it really just reminded me of two stoners talking about things.

Yes, that’s right, traditional economics is failing, but then we knew that. We hear talk that we’re out of the recession, but for a lot of people that doesn’t seem to be true. Many businesses are out of the recession and the “market” seems to think we’re out of the recession. However, what does it mean when the market is out of the recession? A lot of the market runs on high frequency trading, so the market can make money without a lot of people participating. Based on traditional economics theory, these markets should behave in a specific manner and they aren’t.

Slate calls this the difference between salt water and freshwater economics. Where the freshwater economics is based upon a lot of the traditional neoclassical theories, while the salt water economics is what the market traders are using. They’re using physics or other sort of network models that aren’t included in traditional economics theories.

Many of them have begun to use various forms of evolutionary economics, because it works. However, there’s a disconnect between the market and many of the leading theorists in Academia. Why? because those economists have made a career out of developing these theories. I believe that economics is at the beginning of a paradigm shift and it’s going to be painful. A lot of things are going to be changing because of this paradigm shift.

We’re staring at the end of jobs within the next 40 years, not all jobs, but a huge amount of the works force is going to be automated. Google’s working on industrial robotics with Foxconn, multiple companies are working on driverless cars, a few companies have developed drag and drop software so you don’t need to know how to code to develop software which will automate work because you build in your process rather than building your process around the system. This is radically going to change work. In the Race Against the Machine book it’s clear we’re going to be seeing changes in how our society works.

We’re going to be entering a time period where traditional economics doesn’t work and neither does capitalism. A blog post I read the other day has an interesting discussion of how we can move beyond capitalism (based on Star Trek). By the way, when I’m saying capitalism isn’t working, what I mean is that it’s not going to work to fundamentally keep the majority of the people working or provide any realistic relief to non-working people. It will be working quite well for a subset of the population that figure out how to survive or thrive in that economy. The question at that point becomes not what we think our economy is or should be, but what we value as a society.

I’ve talked about this in otherposts in the past, however, I think that when we are looking at the “market place of applicable ideas” and we see that the people that should be influenced the most by economic theory AREN’T using it, but our government is, we have a serious problem. People at banks making huge sums of money on trading should be influenced by economic theory because they deal with vast sums of money and are actively driving a huge portion of our economic activity (valuable or not is another question). If they don’t see value in using those theories, then our leaders that are still applying them need to seriously rethink what theories they are applying to “manage” our economy.

When the prevailing theory in a discipline is failing, for the discipline to survive it must move beyond it. Typically the new theories that save it come from outsiders and indeed in economics it has – from two sources, Biology and Physics. Hopefully our leaders and teachers can see it before our current economic theories destroy us all.

This is the last post I discussed the impact on the computing industry of ubiquitous high speed free wireless internet. In this post I’ll discuss some of the societal changes. In some ways the societal changes may be smaller, at first, than we’d anticipate.

First, we’ve seen how much people have jumped on playing with their phones in public spaces. I fully expect this trend to continue and in fact to increase. Simple to play games like Angry Birds will become more advanced and will likely look better. People will do more work on their phones and will likely begin using video calls in public. Which will be annoying, but it’s going to happen.

There may be a wave of apps that will try to increase the amount of social interaction of players. This doesn’t mean that we’ll have an increase of in person social interaction, but will likely be an increase of virtual social interaction. Which for some people is significantly better than what would happen otherwise.

I think that the ubiquitous internet will have a mixed impact on the ability to do work. As it is a lot of people already spend a great deal of time working from home off the clock. This will likely increase, but I think there will be a trade off. As people will, hopefully, be able to work while commuting more easily on trains and buses. People will begin to work in more places like cafes compared to the amount that currently do.

There will be other changes as new devices and applications are created to take advantage of the high speed internet. Many of these changes will happen as these devices are developed.

I would like to be completely optimistic that the greater the amount of internet will lead to a larger amount of user created content. That the increase of wireless internet will increase personal engagement in political and social activities, but I don’t think it will. I think that there will be a small increase because there will be a larger number of people that weren’t able to do it before are able to do it.

I think that a high percentage of engagement in social networks, content creation and other types of engagement will take some time to occur. I think it’s because of a mind set. A lot of people have no desire to become involved in these types of things. I would like to imagine that these changes will happen over night. However they will not. People will need time to understand how to exploit this infrastructure. It will take time for unique social experiments to develop using the network. Some people will understand immediately how to create new tools for the new environment, but it will take many established firms time to fully exploit it.

It will also take people time to adapt to the change. It’s not obvious in what ways the average user will exploit this technology. In many ways it will just increase the amount of general web browsing going on, in other ways video viewing will increase as well.

In this series I’ve looked at how our government, business, computer and social environments will change based on ubiquitous free wireless internet. It will have immediate changes and longer term changes that currently fall into the realm of science fiction. Device makers and app developers will have a new world to exploit because of increases in computing power locally and remotely. Creating novel methods of using this power is what will drive the next phase in our economy.